Performance Psychology

Start talking about mental toughness in sport and you’ll soon find out that everyone’s got an opinion about it. People will start using words like “hard” and “tough” and “mean” and phrases like “never quits” etc to describe their views about mental toughness. But what is mental toughness? Can it be measured? Can it coached? And if mental toughness can be coached, how can it be coached? This post and podcast discuss mental toughness in sport and suggests a new way of looking at measuring and coaching mental toughness.

There is nothing new about integrating the Mind and the Body to realise successful sports performance. However, what is new is integrating Mind and Body in all aspects of sports coaching and athletic performance every day. This article discusses Sports Psycho – Physiology and challenges athletes, coaches, sports scientists and sporting organisations to reassess how they go about applying the integrated Mind-Body concept in their daily athlete training environment.

Motivation is something many coaches talk about.

Some read about it and try to learn the secrets of motivation in a bid to help their athletes achieve the impossible.

Others spend money on motivational speakers to try and motivate their athletes through a passionate team talk or an explosive, emotional pre-performance presentation.

Others attend courses, go to workshops and enrol in mental skills programs to learn the mysteries of motivation.

Coaches….don’t waste your time and money.

No one can motivate anyone to do anything.

You need to understand Motivation and Coaching. (more…)

Visualisation (imagery) is a technique which many high performance athletes use in their preparation for peak performance and competition. However, visualisation is just as powerful when used by coaches to enhance their coaching performance. This article introduces coaches to the topic of Coaching and Visualisation and discusses how to incorporate visualisation techniques into your coaching program to increase the likelihood of success.

Ask any athlete or coach about the contribution of the mind to performance and they will respond that it will vary between 90 and 95%! Yet, most of time, coaches and athletes leave their mental skills training to the last minute and often it is in the form of a “motivation” talk from a guru or professional speaker. This article discusses the importance of integrating mental skills into every aspect of preparation by understanding how to help athletes “think” differently about their training and how motivation is such a powerful performance enhancement tool in sport.

Know what I really love about high performance sport….what you learn a lot about people.

You see people at their very best when they are happy, excited and jubilant about performing well.

You see people at their very worst when they lose, are disappointed and have experienced failure.

And it is on these moments, when people are at their low point, after experiencing failure that this post is focused…Losing Lyrics: What athletes and coaches say when they lose (and what it tells you about them). (more…)